Millbank chief goes on record with the BBC

12:00AM BST 03 May 2001

WITH an election due to be called in little more than a week, the BBC has made a shrewd hiring. The head of Millbank's rapid-rebuttal unit - which is given much of the credit for the 1997 landslide - has been signed up to join On the Record after the election.

Adam Bowen has been recruited to BBC1's flagship politics programme as a "researcher". The BBC says it is not worried about compromising its impartiality. "Mr Bowen was the best candidate for the job," says a spokesman. "

A lot of our researchers come from the Tory party, you know. He starts on June 10, which will presumably be after the election. Once he starts, he will be required to be as impartial as the rest of our staff and conform to a strict code of conduct."

A colleague who knows him well says: "He's well liked, well respected and at the heart of the Millbank election machine. He's a fanatical Blairite and a political obsessive: brilliant at spotting weaknesses in the Opposition and nailing them with the Excalibur rapid-rebuttal computer."

You can take the boy out of Millbank, but can you take Millbank out of the boy? In the interests of openness, we called Mr Bowen yesterday to ask him. A silence. A click. He transferred us to a press officer without so much as a "Cheerio".